


three in a bed for two

by dilangley



Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Canon Compliant, Chapter 2 of RDR2, F/M, M/M, Smutty Angst, angsty smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 20:24:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16817827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilangley/pseuds/dilangley
Summary: In the middle of the night, through a haze of feverish delirium, John Marston called out for Arthur Morgan, and Abigail Roberts realized what she should have known all along.





	three in a bed for two

**Author's Note:**

> I have no beta beyond spellcheck. Forgive me my sins.

In the middle of the night, through a haze of feverish delirium, John Marston called out for Arthur Morgan, and Abigail Roberts realized what she should have known all along.

The sound haunted her in the weeks to come. She heard it in the muffled quiet of the snow at Colter and in the hum of the breeze through The Heartlands’ waving grasses. Though she tried to lose its refrain in the busy bustle of Horseshoe Overlook, his ragged voice found its way into the cacophony. She would hear it in her bones when he put his arms around her and kissed the top of her head.

“Abigail don’t seem well to me,” she overheard Tilly tell Ms. Grimshaw one day. “Awful quiet when she’s not fighting with John.”

But for Ms. Grimshaw, the woman who knew everything, this was no mystery. She just pressed her lips together, gave her head a firm shake, and sent Tilly back to work. Abigail flushed with shame, for it seemed Ms. Grimshaw had heard it too: that small, definitive proof that fairy tales do not exist.

“You’re a damn fool, John. Your woman’s going stir-crazy here at camp,” Uncle wrongly diagnosed, but it pinched Abigail’s heart and made her smile anyway. Ever since he found her in a saloon and offered her a “home with some good folk,” Uncle had been looking out for her. “I’ll watch the kid. You two go remember how you make one.”

“I’ll watch him,” Hosea corrected. “He can tie lures for these old eyes.”

Abigail warmed at the love surrounding her child, surrounding her, but she did not look over at John. He acquiesced to the pressure of his brothers and started to make noise about getting a room at the saloon in Valentine. Rough edges aside, John brought incredible gentleness to their lovemaking, always treating her with a care and reverence that had once been balm to a working girl’s battered heart. Now in light of hearing Arthur’s name caressed on his tongue, a little desperate, a little needy, that gentility looked like distance.

Only when it became clear her only other option was public rejection did she agree to go with him.

“I’ll ride myself into town, John Marston. I’m no shrinking violet. I’ve got things to do around here before I go be a lady of leisure.”

Stalling, she helped Karen and Mary-Beth do the camp laundry in the river and even made a show of helping Kieran clean blood off the table used for Five Finger Fillet. The sun bobbled against the water at the edge of camp by the time she saddled up one of the spare horses, a pretty Morgan gelding. A low whistling caught her ear. She looked up to see Arthur trotting into camp, back from one of his length excursions, his saddle laden with dead animals and his satchel visibly heavy.

“Hey Arthur! ‘Bout damn time you came back,” Bill groused from his seat by the fire.

“I’ve been working,” Arthur replied. His eyes found Abigail, and his face changed from placid observation to concern. She might have laughed at the soft-hearted soul in this killer if she could bring herself to look him in the eye. Every time she had tried, over morning coffee or at the evening campfire, she looked away first.

“Where are you going?” Arthur asked.

“Into Valentine for the night,” she replied. He shook his head.

“It’ll be dark before you get there.”

“Arthur Morgan, I am perfectly capable…” She began, but Arthur was neither John nor Hosea nor Uncle. He gave her a sour look that would curdle milk.

“No. There’s O’Driscolls everywhere, and this nearest town’s full of drunk ranchers and sheep rustlers. I’ll take you.” He handed his horse’s reins off to Sean and cut him a look. “Give him a good rubdown and fresh hay. Make yourself useful and skin some of these kills before I get back.”

And just like that, Arthur had Abigail on the Morgan she saddled up. He always rode too fast when it was the two of them.

She knew he could do better than that, ride slow and dainty with a lady on board, but he never did. She supposed he might if she would ever give in and admit she was being jostled. Instead, they both played stubborn, him ignoring that he could not breathe in her vice-like grip and her pretending nothing could be more pleasant than being concussed by his shoulders. In the earliest days of the gang, she had stayed in Arthur’s tent, but the union had borne only true friendship, affection, and a little competitive streak.

Then John had taken her out on a job one day, just the two of them, to pick pockets at a Bankers’ Association meeting. They had played a couple, gussied up with stolen clothes and a little hair pomade, and spun stories for listeners of their serene, settled, domestic life. Never before had Abigail gotten to use some of the words she spoke casually here: mortgage, homestead, children. The con became too real when they left, her skirts heavy with wallets, his coat pockets stuffed with trinkets, and he thanked her for being perfect.

“No one has ever played the con that well. I’ve never even played the con that well,” John had said, taking both of her hands in his. “I mean, damn, you almost convinced me I’m a banker and a happy husband.”

They had kissed, right there in the street in front of their wagon, with people passing by and horses stomping and jingling their bridles.

“Newlyweds,” one person had chortled.

Every second of her life had rerouted after that moment, falling into line with new dreams and wishes. Arthur Morgan had watched her move her things from his protective lodgings with a critically affectionate eye.

“John Marston, huh? Never would have dreamed,” he had said then.

Now, as they neared town, amidst foot traffic and wagons, Arthur slowed down.

“What’re you doing here anyway?” He asked.

Lying to Arthur was pointless. His natural bluntness, mistaken for dullness by some, allowed him to cut right through anyone else’s horseshit.

“John and me are staying the night at the hotel.”

“That’s nice.” He sounded like he meant it, paused to consider it, and then added, “That’s real nice. Jack staying with the girls?”

“Hosea.”

“Good hands then.” Arthur clucked a little to the horse as he turned him toward the hitching post in front of a building boldly labeled Saints Hotel. “This is the place.”

“Okay.” She slid off the horse. “Thank you for escorting me.”

“I’m not done yet.” He dismounted too and hitched the gelding. “This hotel can be a little… erm, funny. I want to make sure John made it here and isn’t lying in a ditch somewhere waiting on me to come rescue him.”

She laughed even as his words opened the gaping hole in her chest a little wider. Arthur never seemed to notice how he was the sun around which John orbited. When the older man tilted up his hat, she could watch John do the same thing a few seconds later. If Arthur went hunting and brought back fresh game, John would do the same thing in a day or so. John wasn’t alone, of course; she watched Sean and Javier and Lenny do the same things, but they did it without the quiet intensity in their eyes.

Only her John had that.

“Okay then. No sweet talk for this nice horse? Only your _girl_ gets that,” Abigail said, mimicking the low, husky way Arthur always turned that word into an endearment.

“This boy and I can talk on the ride home,” he said without embarrassment. “C’mon.”

They walked into the hotel. Abigail tried to pretend she was really a fine lady, not the kind of girl impressed by a small hotel in a livestock town, but her eyes widened anyway. Everything was clean and ornamental. The floor had that worn, scrubbed look of one swept and mopped every day. Abigail tucked it away in her head for later, a little line item on her wishlist.

“Why hello, sir. It’s good to see you again. Have you brought the missus this time?” The clerk said, his impartial face hardly matching the friendly tone.

“Nope. Wondering if a man came in to get a room. Ugly as sin, big scars down his cheeks,” Arthur said.

Now the clerk looked wary. “I need you not to cause any more trouble.”

“I didn’t cause no trouble last time. Just helped out a lady friend. Now. Ugly, scars?”

The clerk sighed. “He’s in Room 2B.”

Abigail and Arthur walked toward the stairs, but he only stepped up two.

“Oh, you’re not going to make sure there’s no ruffians between here and the hotel room door?” She teased.

“Reckon not.” Something in his face changed as he looked at her for a few seconds, the stolid gaze softening a little. He fidgeted, almost imperceptibly, from one foot to the other, adjusted his hat, before saying, “Be good to him, Abigail.”

“What?” She startled.

“He nearly died. I saw you, scared out of your mind over it. But when he came back, you barely gave him the time of day. Hell, you told him you’d have preferred him as a corpse.”

“I--” No defense bubbled to her lips, so she was grateful when he interrupted.

“I’m just saying he might not know.” The words fell heavy between them. “Have a good night.”

Arthur tipped his hat and was out the door before she had pulled her jaw shut. Her cheeks burned red, a curious mix of shame and anger flooding her. How dare Arthur Morgan take her to task for such a thing? Was he a moron or a hypocrite? He was the one who hadn’t had a kind word for John since the day he realized the younger man had walked out on them. Every word out of his mouth had been an insult or disinterest for months.

But then Arthur would clean John’s saddle when he oiled his own. He would go along with John’s cockamamie scheme no one else would touch, and he would find a way, every damn day, to be near enough to gruffly ask how John was healing up, even though even a fool could see the cuts had no puff of infection left.

She stomped up the stairs, unable to quiet her feet, and knocked on 2B on unfair fire.

“Hello, darling,” John greeted, pulling open the door. “I was getting worried.”

The room, clean, bright, with a big, soft-looking bed, should have quieted her. It did not.

“You going to ask how I made out coming to town after dark?” She stepped inside.

He shut the door. “I might’ve if you’d given me a second. Any trouble?”

“Arthur brought me,” she said. “He didn’t figure it was safe for me to ride alone with all the O’Driscolls about.”

John’s eyes darkened. “That was nice of him,” he managed.

She waited for him to come back at her, challenge the tone of her voice, but instead, a muscle twitched in his jaw as he held back. He offered her a drink. Proudly producing a bottle of whiskey, he poured two glasses on the sideboard.

Abigail clenched her fingers into her palms and let the fingernails dig crescents in the skin. The little marks faded slowly as she sipped on her first glass of burning liquor and then poured her second too soon. They sat on the bed, on opposite ends, as if distance could turn a bed into a living room, a hotel room with unmarried parents into proper courtship. John talked, and yet she could not hear his voice over _his voice_ , ringing in her skull, ragged and weak and wanting: _Arthur. Arthur. Arthur._

“You know what?” She interrupted him. His mouth settled into a flat line, ready to frown.

“What?”

“I don’t care.” She knocked back the rest of her second glass like a shot. “I don’t care about whatever the hell you’re talking about. I want to talk about something else, John Marston. Do you love me?”

His eyes widened. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “Of course I do.”

“Of course. It’s the behavior of a man in love, isn’t it?” She stared him down. She stood up. “To run away?”

He blazed hot in an instant, the famous John Marston temper roaring to life. “I already told you…”

“That you were scared of being a father and didn’t know that you wanted to try it. I remember. I’m not stupid. You think I really think it’s that easy? You think I’m not smart enough to know that you were scared because now you were stuck, really good and stuck, with me?”

The last two words tasted like fear, dry and bitter as ash in her mouth, but she was glad she spit them out. His face twisted again, for only an instant, and confirmed her words even as he went to deny them.

“Y’know, everyone at camp knows that between you and Molly, there can’t be a day’s peace or happiness, but yeah, it’s my fault. It’s always my fault, right?” He said, and it stung like hell to be compared to useless Molly O'Shea, Dutch's latest trinket.

They squared up against each other, twin pistols smoking and hot, and she delivered another round.

“Sure is. You think you keep secrets pretty well, huh? Surely you’re not such a fool as to even keep them from yourself.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You call out for Arthur in your sleep,” she said. The deliberate misdirection, the omission of key pieces of information, soothed her own pain, so she indulged in another. “Everyone at camp knows it.”

John opened his mouth, but no words came out. She watched that tiny open space between his dry lips speak volumes before he could shut it up.

“I do not,” he said. The resolute tone changed nothing; not when his eyes danced with a thousand shards of shattered assumptions, not when they suddenly looked just like the eyes that had been staring back at her in the mirror since Colter.

She took a step toward him and put a hand on his chest, gave it a seductive slide over the hard bone of his sternum. “I guess I’m just lucky you don’t call out for him any other time, huh?”

“You shut your goddamned mouth.”

She spat her next words like snake venom. “Y’know, I met a lot of men like you before, fucking me with someone else on their mind. I should probably be used to it.”

Even in their most vicious fights, even in the earliest days of their tempestuous romance when their disagreements always came in the form of yelling, Abigail had never feared John would hit her. His hand never clenched at his side, neither a threat nor a hint of resisted temptation.

But with the men, his flare-ups were entirely different. She had seen him flip Sean over a boulder and deliver lightning-fast punches, each one separated by searing insults, until Arthur hauled him off. In the seconds after, when she had naively fretted over permanent hatred, Sean had shrugged and said, “Sorry, I ribbed ya, Johnny. I’m sure your Pa was a fine man and not skirt-wearin’ pigfucker like I mighta suggested.”

Within minutes, they were all at peace again, Arthur patting John’s shoulder with a condemning, understanding hand, John handing Sean back his bowler. They all seemed to feel better. Everything seemed to be _fine._

Abigail longed for that instead of this hot, angry moment with no release.

John grabbed the front of her skirt and pulled her closer to him. His face, inches from hers, his eyes hard as steel, he ground out his words, “That’s enough.”

“Why?” But her breath caught in her throat at the closeness of his mouth, the hard, lean press of his body against hers. If she shut her eyes and shut her heart, she could excuse herself the arousal flaring up, the rush of heat and tingling, the sudden awareness of a growing dampness between her legs. Her cheeks reddened again. “Is all this talk of Arthur a bit too much for you?”

“Stop.” But his voice weakened this time, a little huskier, a little more ragged.

“I’ve been with him, you know,” Abigail purred. She bumped against John, let her body remind his of carnal heat. “He’s handsome, sure, you know that, but that’s not why it’s different being in bed with him.”

She kissed John before he could protest, before he could turn his anger and shame and heat into something manageable, and he sank his fingers deep into the fabric at her sides, held her to him tightly. He crushed her mouth with his, but she nipped his lower lip and slid her mouth along his jawline. She whispered to the soft hollow just below his ear.

“Arthur has the biggest hands. Wide. Long fingers. He’s gentle but not too gentle.” Gooseflesh rose along John’s neck. He still gripped her dress in both hands, like a lifeline holding him to shore as a much-feared ocean threatened to carry him away. She trailed her hand down to his pants, snapped them open with a sureness of she had not used in years. “He likes when you take him in your hand like this.”

She mirrored her words with a soft hand curled around the ramrod length of John’s cock. He choked on the air in his lungs when she began to stroke.

“Surprises. He’s been with so many women over the years that Arthur likes surprises. Slow.” She rolled the soft skin gently under her hand, barely moving.

“Fast.” Her loose hand picked up speed.

“Hard.” She tightened her grip and worked her thumb along the sensitive vein. John groaned, and it vibrated through her body, reminded her of her own urgent arousal. She licked her lips and took care to say Arthur’s name again when she spoke next, her voice still low, close. “Arthur likes to be touched like you mean it. Like this.”

With her other hand, she found John’s and peeled it loose. She flipped her skirt end through her belt expertly, swallowing to keep from tasting the bitterness of having these skills at her disposal, and nudged him back toward the bed. They sank together.

“He’s heavy. Broad.” She licked the words onto John’s collarbone as she guided him to peel off his shirt. Her fingers found the oil lamp on the side table and twirled its knob without looking. The darkness sank over the room like sweet relief. Her hands went back to riding him, working him between two hands until the groans hit a rhythm. “He keeps a little oil in his saddlebag from his plants. To make sure things are always slick.” 

Her eyes adapted to the dark slowly. Only when hers adjusted did she know his were closed.

The hypnosis of her voice, holding John captive, forbidding them both from speaking any of the truths they so desperately needed to analyze, made her bold.

“Do you wish it was Arthur right now?” Her knuckles of her left hand massaged his taint. He moaned, and the sound shot straight through her: she had never heard it before, the sound as low and hungry as an animal in heat, but she recognized the convulsion of his muscles, the quickness of his breathing. She froze him on the edge of his orgasm, a stalled hand tight. “Say it.”

Her own breath hummed too fast, her vision dizzy and sideways with her own heat. She swallowed down the urge to beg him to say it. She swallowed down the urge to beg him _not_ to say it. Everything mixed up and jumbled inside her, and the seconds hung long before she gritted out again, “Say it.”

But she had pushed too far, paused too long.

“Goddamnit.” He cursed. With his forearm tucked under the small of her back, he rolled her beneath him and pressed her down into the bed until she squeaked in pain. His cock was pinned between them, twitching with near-release, but he dug his hand in anyway, fingers finding the slippery heat of her folds. She ground her teeth together, tried not to let his insistent touch rubbing her clit set her free from her anger and purpose.

She tried to remember all the times he had broken her heart, a lifetime’s worth of hurt in a few years, so that this he inflicted on her now could not put her back together. For surely he would shatter her again. He knew no other way.

But it was _John_ , and her head stood no chance against her heart and even less chance against the insistent begging of her body.

He worked a slow finger inside to the knuckle, crooked it against her, as his thumb stroked up, and the ripples began in her and rose and swelled and became waves to become oceans. She dropped her head back and cried out and it was his name and Arthur’s name and the Lord’s name as his unrelenting, unforgiving fingers carried her away from her pain to sweet pleasure.

When he swallowed her moans in his rough kiss and pushed himself into her, she lost herself entirely to the pounding of his hips against hers, the staccato gasp of their breathing, the bitter shared climax of three in a bed where only two should be.

  


\---------------------

  


Abigail sat bolt upright in a bright, sunshiny room. In the few seconds, before her brain relearned her body’s location, she thought of only Jack. When she remembered him back at camp, safe with his Uncle Hosea, she also remembered last night. She pinched her eyes shut again, dragged a weary hand over her face. 

“Morning.” John’s voice turned her attention to the fireplace where he stood, seemingly brewing coffee over the tamed, domestic flames. She would not meet his gaze to know if he was also avoiding hers.

“Morning,” she echoed.

“I made coffee,” he said uselessly. She rose and dressed slowly as he stood in only his Union suit. Together, they moved like ghosts through the room, silent, remaking the bed, drinking steaming coffee, packing their few belongings together. The silence screamed.

Perhaps she should have apologized, for she had been the one to start it, in his eyes, but ignorance was no excuse. He had been hurting her for weeks, and if she had known sooner, she would have only hurt longer. Last night, in the brawny shadow of Arthur Morgan, he had ravaged her like never before. No amount of delicious soreness and lingering heat could change the meaning behind that.

But she didn’t want the apology she was owed. She wanted John to love her the way she loved him. If he could only love her that much, she would not have to hide behind a sharp tongue and practical nagging. She would love him softly if she could. She wanted to.

“Reckon you’re ready to get back to Jack,” John said. “I’ll go feed and saddle up.”

“Okay.”

She ran her hands over the scratchy embroidery of the comforter and restacked the sticky whiskey glasses on the bedside table before walking down.

“I hope you had a pleasant stay, Miss.” The front desk clerk arranged his face to neutrality, quickly but not quickly enough. Her cheeks burned red.

“It was lovely,” she replied. “Thank you.”

In the daylight, Valentine bustled like every town they had ever visited, full of rough men and few women. John had his back to her as she approached him, tightening the girth one last time, and she laid a tentative hand on his shoulder. His muscles stiffened.

“Let’s go home,” she said, mustering up all the gentility she could. He relaxed under her hand. “Jack will be missing us.”

“I’ll buy you breakfast first. There’s a saloon over there serves oatmeal all day and night.” John turned around. “Only thing he serves actually.”

“Oatmeal it is then.”

They walked. He had Old Boy’s reins in one hand and crooked out his elbow for her instinctively. She looped her hand there, ignored how it startled him. Ignoring a sudden, aching urge to cry, she leaned her head against the knotty muscle and hard bone of his shoulder. In the saloon, the owner regarded him warily as he slopped out two bowls of oatmeal and then eavesdropped on their silent breakfast. The oatmeal had lumps the size of dumplings in it. Pearson would have a fit.

They left their bowls on the table, mounted up, and made their way across the pretty green plains toward their new home. Old Boy’s easy rocking-chair canter had carried both of them and Jack more than once, and it lulled Abigail into forgetting for a few blissful minutes. Then John tugged up on the reins and passed the two-tree archway where they should have turned.

He dismounted before she could ask for a reason and looked right at her with burning eyes.

“Abigail, listen to me.” His hoarse voice was low. “You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved, and that’s the truth.”

This fact lay between them unchallenged.

“I should have left well enough alone when you first got here. You might have married Arthur. He’s always thought a lot of you. But things are where they are now. It’s us and the boy. We can’t change nothing.”

These words were no fairy tale revelation from a dime novel, but she listened with her heart pounding her chest as if they were. She slipped out of the saddle and stepped closer to him.

“I won’t lie to you and I won’t go after other women. I’ll take care of you, and I won’t ever leave you. Not no more.” He stared away from her now, looked out over the grasslands for a long pause. “And when all this goes south, I will make sure we’re safe. Or at least, you and Jack are safe. I can’t help a lot of things, and I’m the biggest fool you know, but...”

So stood the liar and thief before her, promising her honesty, delivering it now even when a soothing lie might have made her happier. With no promises of marriage, no whispers of bliss and perfection, he asked her to stay. It was the longest speech she had ever heard him make. He took his hat off and held it both hands.

“If you’ll let me, I’ll be good to you the rest of my life,” he said.

“Okay,” she whispered. She lifted the hat out of his hands and put it on top of his head. Her eyes swam with tears, but she swallowed hard. “Okay.”

He hugged her against him. She buried her nose into the rough leather of his jacket and let the drumbeat of his heart deafen her. He whispered into her hair, his lips tickling her.

“I never want to talk about it again.” His voice was a plea, and she had no illusions as to what it was.

“Okay,” she agreed again. They held on tight as if afraid to let go. Their love was clay pottery, dropped and broken and glued back together so many times its only decorations were its patchwork cracks. They clung to each other until Old Boy whinnied long, loud irritation. A chorus of calls came from the direction of camp, friends welcoming a traveler back to the herd.

“Let’s go home,” John said. They mounted up and trotted back into camp, Bill calling out his usual tone-deaf greeting, Dutch holding court in front of his tent. Even from the hitching posts, Abigail could see Arthur and Jack by a tree, a book balanced between them, with Arthur’s lips moving at an expressive pace. The little boy looked up at the sounds and leaped to his feet, running across the camp.

“Mama!” He jumped into her arms, and she caught him though he was getting just big enough for that to challenge her. John steadied her when the weight threw her off balance. He offered a hesitant pat on Jack’s small shoulder. “I missed you so much.”

“I missed you too, darling.” She kissed his soft head.

“He’s been fine,” Arthur sounded amused. “Playing everybody at camp like a fiddle about how much he missed his mama. He’s been fishing with Kieran and Hosea and picking herbs with Charles. Even got some candy out of Uncle.”

Abigail squeezed another ounce of her love into Jack and set him back on the ground. She teased, “And some reading out of Uncle Arthur.”

“It’s an Otis Miller book,” Jack said seriously, eyes wide.

“Your favorite,” Abigail smiled at him but also made sure to tilt up and share that smile with Arthur for taking his time with her boy.

“Did you have a nice stay?” He asked her, only her, and she nodded. “Good. Listen, do you mind if I borrow John for a few minutes? Sean and Javier are working a lead, and I’d like to think some things through first.”

“He’s all yours,” Abigail said. The two men whirled into motion, strolling away with plans on their lips, guns on their hips, outlaws at work once more. But then John stopped, turned around, and came back to kiss her cheek.

“I’ll be back later. We can read to Jack.”

She nodded, and this time, it hurt less to watch her two favorite men walk away together.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> So I wanted to write something that was not painful. I wanted to write something fix-it instead of canon compliant. Instead... I wrote this. It just wanted to be written, which is especially wild since it BREAKS MY HEART.


End file.
